Simon Armitage

The White Stuff

The White Stuff

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Viking
Published: Feb 5th, 2004
ISBN: 067091343X
Pages: 256

Abbie Fenton wants a child like nothing else on earth. But with her fortieth birthday looming on the horizon, her biological clock is at five-to-midnight. A market researcher for a men’s magazine, she stands in the wind-blasted precinct asking passers-by about their sexual habits and after-shave of choice. If this is life, it wasn’t how she imagined it.

Universal Home Doctor

Universal Home Doctor

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 19 August 2002
ISBN: 0571215335
Price: £12.99
Pages: 66pp.

Published on the same day as Travelling Songs

Travelling Songs - Poem

Oh motorway, motorway, where have you bin, oh motorway where are you stopping? I've bin down to London to pick up the King to take him up north to go shopping.

Oh bring him to us
for a Pontefract cake
and we' 11 light up the sky with a rocket
No, I in taking him home
with the killings he made
with some fluff that he found in his pocket.

From Travelling Songs

Travelling Songs

Travelling Songs

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber & Faber Ltd
Published: 19th August 2002
ISBN: 057121536X
Pages: 26pp.

A small collection of poems, published in conjunction with Universal Home Doctor.

Selected Poems

Selected Poems

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2nd August, 2001
ISBN: 0571210767
Pages: 168pp

From the Publisher
We are pleased to announce the publication of eleven more titles into the new typographic look. The specifications for the books are high -beautifully produced, they all have flaps and are sewn and printed in Italy. The latest batch represents some of the core titles of the backlist (Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, Ted Hughes's New Selected Poems, James Joyce's Poems and Shorter Writings) along with key, single volumes that should be part of any poetry lover's library (and whose reissue, in the form in which they were first published, will give a whole new generation the pleasure of coming to the books as original readers).

Synopsis
This selection offers a retrospective of the contemporary poetry of Simon Armitage, and is a perfect introduction to his work. It includes work chosen by the poet from six published volumes.

Little Green Man on Waterstones.co.uk

Little Green Man on Waterstones.co.uk

Poet Simon Armitage on his first novel, Fingerbobs and The Singing Ringing Tree

Always a grafter, eminent poet Simon Armitage has also written travel adventure ( Moon Country), worked as a probation officer, shelf stacker, Radio 1 disc jockey, lathe operator, lecturer, reviewer and broadcaster. He has now written his first novel, Little Green Man; the tale of a thirty-something man reuniting with childhood friends to play a dark and dangerous game of dare:

Continue...

Little Green Man in The Guardian

Review of Little Green Man from The Guardian

It's not poetry, it's a midlife crisis

Little Green Man

Little Green Man

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Viking Hardback
Published: 2nd August, 2001
ISBN: 0670894427
Pages: 246pp

Thirty-something Barney is out of work and bored. Estranged from his wife and autistic son, Barney finds himself harking back to the glory days of his seventies childhood, and the bonds shared with his school friends Tony Football, Winkie, Pompus and Stubbs: 'your mates with their dozy nicknames' as his wife, Kim, calls them. Rummaging through his parents' attic, amongst the Subbuteo figures and Scalextric cars, Barney finds the very thing to bring them all back together again. The Little Green Man is a precious jade statuette, which the boys enacted dares to possess. Whoever had temporary ownership of the statue, controlled the game.

Armed with the Little Green Man and a valuation certificate for £750,000, Barney resurrects the childhood game of do-or-dare, but this time around the stakes are a little higher. As the dares become wilder, we learn the truth behind the boys' nicknames and discover exactly what kind of men they have grown into. The powerful totem of the Little Green Man causes secrets from the past to be uncovered, and the friends' childhood grudges steadily mutate into adult enmity and violence. But who is controlling the game now?

Mr Heracles

Mr Heracles

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: Sept 2000
ISBN: 0571203337
Pages: 57pp

Mr Heracles. The original 'Heracles' is shocking and strange. It begins in defeat and despair, soars into triumph, waver's on a razor's edge of dramatic uncertainty, then plunges into carnage and horror of the darkest kind.
What is the greatest atrocity a man can commit? What do we mean by hero? Who can apportion blame to the workings of the human mind, and who has the power to forgive? These are questions thrown up by Euripedes' Heracles and tackled by Armitage in language that brings the play's contemporaneity sharply into focus, without diminishing its historical portent.

Mister Heracles was commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse. This volume includes an introduction by the author including a discussion of the 'translation' process and commentary on the thinking behind the project.

Killing Time (Millenium Poem)

A man strolls past the town hall wearing a sandwich-board for a coat, and it ain't for the next closing-down sale, or the time of the next coach,

and it ain't for the price of a fake tan
or bringing the government down,
or happy hour, or two-for-one,
or the circus coming to town,

or a secret truth that God knows,
or the end of the world being nigh,
it says NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS
but it don't say why.

From Killing Time